Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef - By Charles Williams Page 0,83
some bread crumbs. Don’t fly away.”
When I came back on deck he was still sitting on the piece of wood. “Nice seagull,” I said. I threw the bread crumbs. He flew away. I began to cry.
I threw some more. Maybe he would come back and mark the place again. He had to come back because the other piece of driftwood had a seagull on it. I could see her. She was beckoning, a flash of silver falling into blue.
“Swede, angel,” I said. “I didn’t make you understand. We can escape.”
I began to feel weak. I hadn’t eaten anything for a long time. I ran a hand across my face, and felt shaky all over, waiting for the seagull to come back.
Something heavy was on my shoulders. I felt the straps across my chest. I was wearing the aqualung. That was what I’d gone after.
I screamed.
I tore it off and ran below. I fell into a bunk and lay there, shaking. My mind was clear again. I covered my face with my hands.
Seventeen
It’s all past. I’m rational again, but it scares me to think how near the edge I was a week ago. The whole thing was morbid and neurotic, and it almost cost me my life. I’m ashamed, and she would have been ashamed of me.
The sense of loss is no less terrible than it was, but I can accept it now and go on, the way you’re supposed to. Instead of lacerating myself with all that morbid what-might-have-been I try to remind myself that we did have eight days and that there are millions of people who’ve lived out their entire lives without one hour of what we knew.
Writing it down has helped. What I wanted to do was see it all in one piece, and I did, and I think I see now that she couldn’t have done it deliberately. She was happy. Right to the end. The end was an accident. It had to be.
I’m going on to the Caribbean, the way we had planned. There is a little wind now. I’ve been steadily under way for two days. After I regained my senses there was no wind for a long time and I continued drifting to the westward, but I’ve regained nearly all that on my way into the Yucatan Strait. My sight at noon today put me eight miles northwest of the spot she died. It’s now one p.m., and if the wind holds steady I should pass somewhere over 23.50 North, 88.45 West just at four p.m.
I don’t know any of the service for burial at sea, and there’s no Bible aboard so I can’t do much, but I do intend to drop something of hers just to mark her grave. That white dress I liked so well, I think. I’ll weight it.
* * *
I’ve just lashed the tiller again and come back below. It’s 3:30 now, and the breeze is holding on, what there is of it. I don’t think I’m logging more than two knots, but at least I’m on my way and all the sickness has ended. It’s good to be clearheaded and well again. I still don’t understand why they had to take her away from me, but maybe you’re not supposed to understand it. Maybe you’re only supposed to learn to live with it.
I went to get the white dress ready, but while I was in her things I found the little flask of perfume. It would be much more appropriate; I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the first place. There’s something personal about it. It’s so completely hers. It has a French name I’m not familiar with, and I never knew anyone else who used it.
It’s here on the chart table where I’m writing. I removed the glass stopper and held it under my nose for an instant, and in replacing it I spilled a drop on the chart under this book. It’s amazing how one drop of something so delicate could invade a whole compartment. It must be very expensive.
Of course, when I drop it the chances are I won’t be within a mile of the place she died, but she’ll understand. Navigation is never that exact. In the final analysis it’s only a human being measuring something with an instrument designed by another human being, and as such is subject to human error, however small. That’s one thing that scares me about the way I was—thinking, like Macaulay, that you could go